"Couldn't hurt, if you have the time."

"Technically we're not patrolling literally all the time. Would the Protectorate cover it, do you think?"

"You could make a case for using your budget towards it."

"Well I'm making my case, and since you're the captain..."

"I don't allocate your budget. I have almost no actual power. You'd have to ask Piggot. Or I can do it for you, I guess, but I can't do it on my own recognizance."

Sigh. "Yeah. Guess I should ask Piggot, and not be surprised when she says no."

"...that is likely, isn't it."

"The only reason I'm not positive she's doing it is because I'm not positive he had a family and she hasn't held it over you."

"Yeah. Do you think she would've held it over me? I'm honestly not sure."

"At least subtly. You could've missed it."

"I... don't think I would've," they say dubiously. "I mean unless it was really really subtle and could completely be interpreted as her holding something else over me, or just general warnings like the ones she gave me after the... first Yates incident."

"Maybe she didn't then, I don't know."

"Well it's been two months, she's had lots of opportunities to."

"So I predicted wrong about Piggot, sue me."

"I'm mostly reassuring myself here. Sorry."

"Ah, gotcha."

Shrug. "Well, I can't spend the rest of my time here cowering in fear of Piggot and never talking to her, and I don't think it's... productive to live under the shadow of my fuck-ups. Not that they weren't major, or that I should forget them, but..."

"Yeah, I get it."

"So, let's stop talking about my fuck-ups and continuing to ruin my image to you and start talking about something that could actually help."

"What do you have in mind?"

"The Endbringers."

"Well, that's a bit of a leap from acting classes and druglord cape."

"It's been on my mind, mostly because an attack is due soon, and I haven't actually really done anything that could help better that gun. And, you know, brainstorming ideas and bouncing them off each other is a good first step, and you're good at the whole 'thinking' thing, so."

"Assemble it on the plane while people are watching; I'll throw in a pair of hands and Tinker technobabble. Solicit help carrying it, ideally after our team's scattered and you can ask for somebody else who didn't see it in progress, spread it around. Run tests out on platforms over the water against targets you create that can dramatically shrivel up and do this after you've put a couple episodes of that internet TV channel you were going to do and never got around to. Make it loud and annoying-sounding when it amps up but don't give it more than about five seconds to do it, next one won't be Leviathan but time still counts."